The Disinvent Movement

By Susanna Gendall

Every week we would disinvent something. This week it would be plastic. Next week it would be the aeroplane. I stood outside the supermarket and handed out flyers, which people kindly refused as they left carrying large packs of bottled water.'The short history of the Disinvent Movement is told by its creator as she looks back on her life in New Zealand, France, Switzerland and other countries. Intertwined with the movement are her efforts to find a way inside' an entry point to the system in which so many others seem to be living happily. But once you're in, what if you want to escape? How do you disinvent the all-encompassing structure of a violent marriage?The Disinvent Movement is a brilliantly original and poignant first novel, both elliptical and direct, about how we dismantle and remake our stories and re-cast the people who occupy the most important roles in our lives in hopes of finding sanctuary.'Funny, sad, brilliantly observational' —Renee Liang, Kete Books'a highly original and moving exploration of the division we all experience between who we are to ourselves and who we appear to be to others' —Rachel O'Connor, Landfall Review OnlineLike Olivia Lai

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781776564002

Book preview

1

I had to go to the doctor. He was interested in the shape of the wound on my forehead, which he thought resembled a letter in Arabic. Arabic was his maternal language and he thought it was unfortunate that it had a reputation for being an ugly language when in fact it was very beautiful. He recited a poem for me in Arabic about the rain.

‘Do you see?’ he said. ‘Can you hear?’

‘I can.’

‘Keep still,’ he said.

He was less interested in how I got the wound, but I told him anyway as I’d spent all morning rehearsing.

‘You see, I always go to the swimming pool on Thursday mornings, but when I got there I found that I’d forgotten my jandals.’

‘Ah yes, and you slipped.’

I liked how eager he was to conspire with me.

‘I slipped right next to the children’s pool where those bars stick out – you know? I guess I hit a sharp edge on my way down.’

He didn’t want to talk about accidents anymore. He wanted to talk about French swimming pools and how much he hated them, how slippery the floors were and how he couldn’t stand all that nonsense about compulsory bathing caps – and what on earth were all those shallow heavily chlorinated pools that one had to wade through to access the main swimming pool? It was like being in wartime again. He’d seen it a thousand times – people slipping over on those ridiculous floors. This was the first time, however, that he’d seen such an exquisitely shaped result.

‘Would you mind if I took a photo?’ he said.

I didn’t mind.

He said that unfortunately it looked like I would need stitches.

‘We could try a steri-strip.’ He walked over to his desk and opened a drawer as if he might just happen to have one on him.

I asked him what a steri-strip was. I had been a good student and knew when to ask a question.

He told me that it was a piece of adhesive gauze that encouraged two pieces of separated skin to knit together again. It made me think of the North Island and the South Island, which I’d heard were imperceptibly moving closer to each other. He returned from the drawer empty-handed and peered into the cut.

‘But this one looks as if it will need some help from the outside.’

He produced two packages, which he ripped open with his teeth. I inhaled the coffee on his breath as he dabbed something yellow over the cut. To my surprise, he began to thread an actual needle. I’d always assumed ‘stitches’ was a metaphor for something else. It had not occurred to me that a person could be sewn up like a doll. When my mother had sewn up a doll whose head had become detached from her body, she had drawn attention to the neutral expression on the doll’s face to prove that it didn’t hurt her. I focussed on keeping my face blank as the doctor sewed five stitches into my forehead. He told me on the way out that if I must go to the swimming pool I should always remember my jandals. There were many varieties of fungal infection at those French swimming pools that were just waiting to be picked up.

2

How does one get in?

There was the squash playing. The squash court was inside a large windowless building of which the entrance itself had been particularly hard to find. If only it was as easy as finding a doorway. The real problem was once you were inside alone with the squash balls and squash rackets on the squash court. I thought this was going to be a good place for me – it was cool and dark and there were no teams or uniforms or girls who demanded you pass them the ball. And when people asked me what I’d been doing all afternoon I could say, ‘I’ve been playing squash.’

But squash did not want me to play with it. I kept swinging my racket but the ball dodged it. I did not take my eyes off the ball. The more I watched it the less I hit it. After a while it began to feel like a conspiracy between the racket and the ball to keep me out. It was an awesome feeling to build up so much hate for something. The man told my mother that my imagination was proving problematic and that I should come back in six months once I’d settled down. He thought I was intentionally keeping myself out. ‘There’s a door,’ he said, ‘but she’s decided not to walk through it.’

3

There was that time I looked around and noticed that everyone else had crossed over to the other side. I had no idea where they were or how they got there – all I knew was that I was not with them. It looked so picturesque over there. They all had bras on and were sharing private jokes. I made several attempts at crashing on through, but like with everything there was a proper way to go about things. I had to walk through the front door just as they had. For a brief infantile moment I thought that they had simply forgotten me, and I waited patiently like the goat in that story for someone to come back and get me.

This was not that story.

4

Every day it was the same scene: the bus, the field and the different constellations dotted across the field like a whole cosmos that you could only access through a telescope. I wondered if you could get confined in childhood forever – the same way adults get confined in adulthood – and be unable to proceed instead of unable to return. In the end I sat it out in the toilets and waited for the present to end.

I don’t know if it ever did. I realised this recently when I found myself in a hot meeting room with eleven teachers and a blue-eyed principal in a high school in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Although I understood most of what they were saying, and in theory I spoke French, their faces revealed layers and layers of perplexity every time I opened my mouth. Language was clearly not the partner in crime I had been led to believe it was. Language had fuck-all to do with it. It was very unladylike to say fuck-all in French – even the filmmaker who lived across the road and liked to dress up as Wonder Woman never did it. There was a moment of silence in the meeting room, and I realised I had been naïve. The way in was somewhere much deeper. It was buried. You had to go through subterranean tunnels to find it, like the tunnels I’d been told still existed under the school, accessible through trapdoors that could be found in the boys’ toilets. You basically had to bury yourself alive if you ever wanted to find them.

5

I joined a gym for a while. I must have been twelve. My friend Asher already went and she suggested we go to the aerobics class together. Plus there was a café